Spirit Beads and Leaving Behind Perfection

Leaving Behind Purity & Perfection for the Virgo Lunar Eclipse

I’ve been thinking a lot about purity and perfection.

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When I was eleven I lived in South Dakota for six months. My mom took a job there and I moved with her while my dad, sister, and brother stayed in California.

Living there was a far cry from what I was used to in California (where I had lived ever since I could remember). Moving to South Dakota from Southern California, in the middle of winter, felt like profound culture shock. The weather was different and the people were different. (It was also weird to go from living in a place that doesn’t “see” Native Americans to living in a place where Native Americans were close to ten percent of the population.)

Once we moved, my mom often wanted to go to pow-wows. At one, she offered to buy me some earrings. Or maybe I was just looking at them, trying to choose what to buy. My memory is not exact.

I picked up one pair with a color scheme I liked, pink and green. But as I looked closer I found a mistake - a yellow bead placed in a sea of green. I put them down and found another pair that I liked with a blue, white, and black pattern. But there again, in a swath of blue beads was one white bead, just sitting there. A mistake again! I wanted perfect earrings - not ones where there was a mistake.

I picked up a third pair. This time, I would find a pair that didn’t have any mistakes. But no, I found it again - one bead off in the pattern.

It was impossible to find perfection, nearly every pair of earrings I looked at had a mistake.

“All of these earrings have a mistake in them,” I complained to my mom while also being oblivious to the Anishinaabe woman (who probably made them) looking away with a steely gaze. (Sitting here writing this, I’m red with embarrassment over the memory.)

So, we did not buy any earrings because “all of them had a mistake,” or so I thought.

Months later I was hanging out at another pow-wow with a friend from school, Jessy. We were looking at earrings together. I had run into her there, she was white but her father taught art history at the local college. His speciality was Native American art, which was maybe one of the reasons she was at the pow-wow.

Jessy picked up a pair of earrings and looked carefully at them.

“Look, there.” She pointed to the off-color bead in a sea of same colored ones. “All beaded work has one bead that’s wrong in it. It represents how only God is perfect. I heard this artist woman talk in my dad’s class all about it.”

“Cool,” was all I could say in the moment because inside I felt that familiar dread of embarrassment.

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And, actually what is so embarrassing about this whole memory is that the tradition of beading in an “off” bead (a spirit bead) is common in Métis and Anishinaabe culture, which is my ancestry. Plus, it is hilarious to me that my white friend from school had to tell me this. (Ah! Such is life under colonialism when your parents can’t even pass on cultural knowledge like this.)

(Alas! What about notions of purity and culture? Should I pretend to be this pure Indigenous person who is born already knowing about spirit beads?)

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This memory came up because I’ve been thinking a lot about purity and perfection. And after some research, I found that the “off” bead in a beaded work is called a spirit bead, and it represents humility and the beauty of imperfection. As my friend noted, it is done to show that only the Creator is perfect. That’s where the humility lies.

But it’s also done to show the beauty of imperfection. Not everything in nature can be called perfect, but much of it can be called beautiful. There’s a beauty to the natural world that we, as humans, can never replicate. And similarly there is a beauty to this world that we don’t pay enough attention to. Everything is always already perfect as it is.

Sometimes things are beautiful because they’re a little off or they’re a little ugly. As with artistic work, sometimes it’s the imperfections or the wildness in the work that make something beautiful. It’s never the perfection of something that makes it beautiful. Isn’t that why AI looks kinda weird?

And also, imperfections make something unique - a one of a kind.

Our ideas of perfection and purity hold us back.

I could linger and toile on this post forever, trying to make it perfect, but I’m not going to. I’m going to post it even if it’s not perfect.

And so, for an artist to express themselves sometimes they just have to let go the idea of perfection.

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And also, I’ve been thinking a lot about purity and perfection because of the recent Virgo lunar eclipse (March 13th). Eclipse season is known for bringing on a rapid change that lasts for six months (until the next lunar eclipse.) This last eclipse was in Virgo and it was a lunar eclipse which means it rushes things out of our lives.

As an astrological magician (of sorts), this time, the next six months, my advice is to expel or banish those Virgo traits that are detrimental to your artistic practice.

One Virgo trait that I find detrimental is the compulsion towards purity and perfection. I couldn’t post this if I had to wait for it to be perfect. You see, these writings would never be perfect!

A spirit bead might look like a mistake (to an adolescent girl wanting to buy earrings), but in actuality a spirit bead represents humility and the unique beauty of wildness.